Contents

Books

Big Data, Big Dupe is a little book about a big bunch of nonsense. The story of David and Goliath inspires us to hope that something little, when armed with truth, can topple something big that is a lie. This is the author's hope. While others have written about the dangers of Big Data, Stephen Few reveals the deceit that belies its illusory nature. If "data is the new oil," Big Data is the new snake oil. It isn't real. It's a marketing campaign that has distracted us for years from the real and important work of deriving value from data.

Signal, Stephen Few, $45.00 (U.S.), Analytics Press, 2015

As organizations are scrambling to implement new software and hardware to increase the amount of data they collect and store, they are unwittingly making it harder to find the needles of useful information in the rapidly growing mounds of hay. If you don't know how to differentiate signals from noise, adding more noise only makes things worse. When we rely on data for making decisions, how do we tell what qualifies as a signal and what is merely noise? In and of itself, data is neither. Assuming that data is accurate, it is merely a collection of facts. When a fact is true and useful, only then is it a signal. When it's not, it's noise. It's that simple. In Signal, Stephen Few provides the straightforward, practical instruction in everyday signal detection that has been lacking until now. Using data visualization methods, he teaches how to apply statistics to gain a comprehensive understanding of one's data and adapts the techniques of Statistical Process Control in new ways to detect not just changes in the metrics but also changes in the patterns that characterize data.

Stephen Few exposes the common problems in dashboard design and describes its best practices in great detail and with a multitude of examples in this updated second edition. Dashboards have become a popular means to present critical information at a glance, yet few do so effectively. When properly designed to support rapid monitoring, dashboards engage the power of visual perception to communicate a dense collection of information efficiently and with exceptional clarity and that visual design skills that address the unique challenges of dashboards are not intuitive but rather learned. This book not only teaches how to design dashboards but also gives a deep understanding of the concepts—rooted in brain science—that explain the why behind the how.

Most presentations of quantitative information are poorly designed—painfully so, often to the point of misinformation. This problem, however, is rarely noticed and even more rarely addressed. We use tables and graphs to communicate quantitative information: the critical numbers that measure the health, identify the opportunities, and forecast the future of our organizations. Even the best information is useless, however, if its story is poorly told. This problem exists because almost no one has ever been trained to design tables and graphs for effective and efficient communication. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten is the most accessible, practical, and comprehensive guide to table and graph design available.

Now You See It, Stephen Few, $45.00 (U.S.), Analytics Press, 2009

Now You See It does for data analysis what Stephen Few's book Show Me the Numbers does for data presentation: it teaches simple, fundamental, practical techniques that anyone can use—only this time they're for making sense of information, not presenting it. These techniques rely primarily on something almost everyone has: vision. They use graphs to display data in ways that make trends, patterns, and exceptions visible and reveal the stories that lie within. These techniques also involve interacting with data in particular ways to tease out relevant facts and what they mean.

Although some quantitative data analysis can only be done using sophisticated statistical techniques, most of the questions that organizations typically ask about their data can be answered using simple visualization techniques—techniques that can be learned by people with little or no statistical training. In other words, Now You See It is for the great majority of people whose jobs require them to make sense of quantitative information. Until now, no book has done this, even though the need is huge, critical, and rapidly growing.